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Several theories have been proposed to explain the impact of ecological conditions on differences in life history variables within and between species. Here we compare female life history parameters of one western lowland gorilla population(Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and two mountain gorilla populations(Gorilla beringei beringei).

We compared the age of natal dispersal, age of first birth, interbirth interval, and birth rates using long‐term demographic datasets from Mbeli Bai (western gorillas), Bwindi Impenetrable National Park and the Virunga Massif (mountain gorillas).

The Mbeli western gorillas had the latest age at first birth, longest interbirth interval, and slowest surviving birth rate compared to the Virunga mountain gorillas. Bwindi mountain gorillas were intermediate in their life history patterns.

These patterns are consistent with differences in feeding ecology across sites. However, it is not possible to determine the evolutionary mechanisms responsible for these differences, whether a consequence of genetic adaptation to fluctuating food supplies (“ecological risk aversion hypothesis”) or phenotypic plasticity in response to the abundance of food (“energy balance hypothesis”). Our results do not seem consistent with the extrinsic mortality risks at each site, but current conditions for mountain gorillas are unlikely to match their evolutionary history. Not all traits fell along the expected fast‐slow continuum, which illustrates that they can vary independently from each other (“modularity model”). Thus, the life history traits of each gorilla population may reflect a complex interplay of multiple ecological influences that are operating through both genetic adaptations and phenotypic plasticity.

Ecological factors, but also tooth‐to‐tooth contact over time, have a dramatic effect on tooth wear in primates. The aim of this study is to test whether incisor tooth wear changes predictably with age and can thus be used as an age estimation method in a wild population of mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) from Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.

In mountain gorillas of confidently known chronological age (N = 24), we measured the crown height of all permanent maxillary and mandibular incisors (I¹, I₁, I², I₂) as a proxy for incisal macrowear. Linear and quadratic regressions for each incisor were used to test whether age can be predicted by crown height. Using these models, we then predicted age at death of two individual mountain gorillas of probable identifications, based on their incisor crown height.

Age decreased significantly with incisor height for all teeth, but the upper first incisors (I¹) provided the best results, with the lowest Akaike's Information Criterion corrected for small sample size (AICc) and lowest Standard Error of the Estimate (SEE). When the best age equations for each sex were applied to gorillas with probable identifications, the predicted ages differed 1.58 and 3.33 years from the probable ages of these individuals.

Our findings corroborate that incisor crown height, a proxy for incisal wear, varies predictably with age. This relationship can be used to estimate age at death of unknown gorillas in the skeletal collection, and in some cases, to corroborate the identity of individual gorillas recovered from the forest postmortem at an advanced state of decomposition. Such identifications help fill gaps in the demographic database and support research that requires individual‐level data.